This Is the War’s Decisive Moment | Cybersecuring the Pipeline | Hacking Smart Buildings, and more
Veterans of Terrorist Attacks and Families Push for Access to Afghanistan Funds (Leo Shane III, Military Times)
A group of more than 500 veterans and military family members are pushing lawmakers to broaden federal plans for distributing billions in seized Taliban funds to include more victims of terrorist attacks, rather than limiting it to only Sept. 11 victims. In a letter to the leaders of the House and Senate Armed Services committees, the group argues that the move is needed to better recognize all military personnel “who were killed or severely injured as a result of state-sponsored terrorist attacks while serving our country around the world at U.S. embassies, military installations and in international waters.” Signers include surviving family members and veterans involved in the 1996 Khobar Towers bombing in Saudi Arabia, the 1983 U.S. Marine barracks bombing in Lebanon, the 1968 USS Pueblo incident with North Korea and several other international incidents. The lack of funding has led to increased poverty, and aid groups have warned of a looming humanitarian catastrophe. All could potentially financially benefit from the change in policy, along with several thousand others.
Afghan Resistance Groups Eye Spring Offensive (Lynne O’Donnell, Foreign Policy)
Armed resistance against the Taliban is picking up momentum across Afghanistan, with militias run by former political and military leaders of the collapsed republic recruiting and arming fighters, notably from the ranks of the former republic’s U.S.-trained security forces. Some are trying to drum up international support for forcible regime change, according to sources among the groups, who have eyes on a spring offensive. But the lack of unity among leaders of the armed opposition groups, who regard each other more as rivals than comrades, could mean they are unlikely for now to make much progress in their shared ambition to overthrow the Taliban, a movement that has been galvanized by the extremists’ repression of women, girls, and ethnic groups. “The Taliban have proven they cannot govern, cannot address their own differences, and cannot address the concerns of neighboring countries, so there is an awareness of new geopolitical dynamics and realities,” said Mirwais Naab, a former deputy foreign minister working with the National Resistance Front, the most prominent of the opposition groups.
The Myth Far-Right Zealots Run Ukraine Is Russian Propaganda (Alexander Ritzmann, Euronews)
As the war in Ukraine rages on, Europe’s international policy analysts and journalists have turned their attention to the Azov regiment, a former Nazi-insignia-carrying extreme-right street militia that has become integrated into Ukraine National Guard. Putin himself has claimed one of his reasons for the invasion was to “denazify Ukraine”. This claim is a lie, plain and simple. What Putin really wants is a Ukrainian government that obeys his commands. Nonetheless, western media has come to develop a sort of Azov obsession, buoyed by a complete lack of nuance in the reporting around this group. One key factor missing in all of the analyses of the Azov: the difference between the Azov movement and the Azov regiment. The West’s Azov obsession and the inability to properly understand the overall phenomenon has even led to the spread of damaging anti-Ukraine propaganda in the media. Certainly, the Azov movement is a dangerous key player of the transnational extreme-right. The movement has served as a network hub for several years now, with strong ties to far-right extremists in many EU countries and the US.
Cybersecuring the Pipeline (Ido Kilovaty, Lawfare)
The two TSA mandatory directives are a welcome step to ensure that pipeline owners and operators implement the basic safeguards required to repel cyberattacks. Yet certain weaknesses in the current approach need to be acknowledged.
New Tech, New Concepts: China’s Plans for AI and Cognitive Warfare (Koichiro Takagi, War on the Rocks)
The United States and its allies may have built the Maginot Line of the information age. But just as the German armored units broke through the Ardennes Forest in ways the French did not expect, so the Chinese People’s Liberation Army may break through the United States’ information-age arsenal, no matter how cutting-edge, if the technology remains tied to the operational concepts of a previous era. China is developing a new concept of warfare, which they call intelligentized warfare (智能化战争). First mentioned by the government in 2019, it is an innovative military concept with a focus on human cognition, which Beijing intends to use to bring Taiwan under its control without waging conventional warfare. However, only a few of the many studies on intelligentized warfare have focused on this aspect of human cognition.
Chinese thinkers have clearly stated that the core operational concept of intelligentized warfare is to directly control the enemy’s will. The idea is to use AI to directly control the will of the highest decision-makers, including the president, members of Congress, and combatant commanders, as well as citizens. “Intelligence dominance” or “control of the brain” will become new areas of the struggle for control in intelligentized warfare, putting AI to a very different use than most American and allied discussions have envisioned.
